It is ironic, in a movie of uncommon valuable irony, that Marie Kreutzer’s cleverly directed however nonetheless darkly bleak “Light Monster” — the Austrian director’s Cannes-competition-selected follow-up to his Un Sure Regard prize-winner “Corsage” — shouldn’t solely start and finish with a trampoline, however ought to to some extent hinge on the easy, blissful picture of a bit of boy doing somersaults and bouncing on it. Tracing a linear, downward trajectory, Kreutzer’s disconcerting movie depicts neither such dynamic highs nor lows. Right here, what goes up should come down and down and even decrease.
The little boy is Johnny (Malo Blanchet), the son of younger mother and father Lucy (Léa Seydoux) and Philip (Laurence Rupp). Lucy is French and an avant-garde musician who performs deconstructed covers of pop songs, solely written by male artists, performed on a spread of bizarre devices and seemingly designed by herself. Philip is an Austrian and a filmmaker who works in tv to pay the payments, whose pressures have apparently led to burnout. A prologue reveals Lucy training the piano (a prophetic reinterpretation of Charles and Eddie’s “Would I Mislead You?” which, like all of the music, is organized by composer Camille) of their metropolis residence, when Philip staggers in, within the throes of a large panic assault.
So the trio strikes to a home within the quieter environment of the German countryside, the place they imagine they’ll make a contemporary begin. The couple makes love on the mattress of their bed room (set designer Myrna Wolf does a superb job of evoking the sensation of a brand new life, not but settled, via the small print of the untended backyard and rooms with too little furnishings). They’re speaking about eliminating their cell telephones and putting in a landline. They purchase and assemble a trampoline for Johnny, and Philip waves to him from an upstairs window and movies him, bouncing and doing somersaults.
That is, in essence, an peculiar household, albeit from the artistic class, who talk in a polyglot hodgepodge disadvantaged of German, French and, amongst adults, typically English. And all the things in cinematographer Judith Kaufmann’s muted, naturalistic frames, from the informal familiarity of the performances — with beautiful noticed particulars like the way in which Philip can solely get Johnny to brush his enamel by timing the strokes to the child’s throaty rendition of Coldplay’s “Yellow” — conjures up us to put money into their normalcy. Regardless of Philip’s melancholy, there’s hope for stability of their new group. It is all of the extra surprising when Munich’s little one intercourse crimes unit, led by younger officer Else Kühn, reveals up at their door to grab computer systems and telephones and arrest a gray-faced Philip, whose expression suggests he is conscious of why they’re there.
From right here on out, we’re with Lucy in her bewilderment, her dawning worry, and her rising panic over suspicions, which she can not definitively show, that her beloved husband could not solely be a purveyor of on-line little one pornography, however could have abused their little one. On the identical time, a lot to Officer Kühn’s not-so-subtle disdain, his thoughts races to discover a approach to mitigate the horrors of which Philip is accused – and Seydoux is especially good at conveying Lucy’s willful, generally delusional want to, as she places it, “be sure that all this does not occur.” She reacts with a form of horrified reduction when Philip first tells her that he distributed pedophile materials “for the cash.” However this, like his preliminary declare that it was all analysis for a documentary, additionally seems to be false. “What cash?” » a jaded and seen-it-all police investigator mentioned to Kühn, barely suppressing a motion of his eyes.
The one reduction from this shut deal with Lucy comes from a subplot about Agent Kühn’s growing old father and his repeated, undesirable groping of his live-in caregiver, Natalia (Patrycja Ziółkowska). And it supplies little actual reduction, when Kühn herself is responsible of the identical type of minimization she is in any other case so dismissive of in her arduous day job, writing off her father’s sexually inappropriate conduct as a symptom of his encroaching senility and providing Natalia extra money to place up with it. So this story merely echoes the opposite, as if the movie’s basic level is that males will at all times be abusive and the ladies who love them, although they need to know higher, will at all times attempt to excuse them.
However then, regardless of Kreutzer’s evident intensive analysis and Seydoux’s undeniably compelling dedication to his character’s horror and heartbreak, it is troublesome to discern the true motivating intention behind “Light Monster,” until it’s to place us all on alert to the truth that the kindly faces of the boys’s nearest and dearest can conceal indescribable depravity. However would not it’s a type of monstrosity to suspect a associate, or a father, of such heinous crimes with out justification? “Light Monster” is a meticulously believable depiction of the dissolution of a household in essentially the most trust-destroying circumstances, however that is all it’s, and aside from moments when Lucy loses herself in performing a track she ripped off from the person who wrote it and remade in her personal voice, it presents us no method out of the darkness of this devastated lady’s darkest days.